A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computerized multimedia prose, document and quantitative literacy system ("Computerized Literacy System"). The Computerized Literacy System may be used by a teacher in a small group setting (e.g., from three to twenty students), or operated by students without the presence of a teacher, either alone or in small groups. The system teaches students skills for using printed information, and how to think critically about the organization of that information. In one preferred embodiment, the system teaches students to understand and use "documents," i.e., structured information such as schedules, tables, charts, graphs and forms. That embodiment of the present invention provides students with a computerized, systematic approach for understanding the basic structure of documents found most often in our society.
B. Description of the Prior Art
People are required many times every day to identify and use information available in printed material. Printed material includes words and numbers which are visible, regardless of whether they appear on a piece of paper or on a computer screen. In accordance with the present invention, printed material can be broken down into three general types: prose, documents, and quantitative material. Prose is printed material that is typically organized in paragraph format, such as that found in newspaper articles, magazines, brochures, poems and books. Documents are printed material that is typically organized in matrix format, such as tables, schedules, indexes, forms, charts, graphs, maps, recipes, labels and television listings. Quantitative material is printed material containing numerical information that can be presented in either prose or document format, such as menus, checkbooks, or advertisements.
In 1985, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, under a grant to Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey ("ETS"), applicants' assignee, developed and conducted a household survey of the literacy skills of young adults, ages 21 to 25. In order to consider the many points of view that exist regarding literacy, ETS convened panels of experts who helped set the framework for this assessment. Their deliberations led to the adoption of the following definition of "Literacy Skills," used herein: Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.
The survey reported on the Literacy Skills of young adults in terms of three scales representing distinct and important kinds of Literacy Skills, one for each type of printed material. Prose Literacy Skills involve the skills and strategies needed to understand and use information contained in prose. Document Literacy Skills involve the knowledge and skills required to locate and use information contained in documents. Quantitative Literacy Skills involve the knowledge and skills needed to apply arithmetic operations, either singly or sequentially, that are imbedded in either prose or document format, such as balancing a check book, figuring out a tip, completing an order form, or determining the amount of interest from a loan advertisement.
The results of the survey were, in brief, that although more than half of young adults were estimated to have attained low and moderate levels of proficiency, relatively few young adults were estimated to have reached levels of proficiencies associated with the most complex and demanding tasks encountered in modern society. In addition, the survey found that minority group members as well as those persons who have terminated their education at an early point are disproportionately underrepresented at the moderate to high proficiency levels. The survey concluded that coordinated efforts seem to be needed both to develop and to apply appropriate intervention strategies that will allow individuals to take advantage of their existing skill levels in upgrading their proficiencies. The present invention was designed, in part, to provide this much needed new approach to teaching. Before it can be understood, some additional background information about each of the three types of printed material must be provided.
1. Prose
There are three qualitatively different types of skills involved in Prose Literacy Skills. The first is locating information in text, which requires a reader to match information sought with the identical or corresponding information stated in the text. An example of this type of skill is finding the answer to a question in textual material. The second type of skill is producing and interpreting text information. This requires a reader to use background knowledge or a combination of background and text information to produce a response that supports a given statement or idea, for example, writing a job description. The third type of skill is generating a theme or organizing principle from text information. This requires a reader to synthesize information to generate a theme or organizing principle that is consistent with the arguments provided in a text, for example, determining the theme of a poem or the main argument of a newspaper column.
2. Documents
The amount of time people spend reading and using documents may vary according to background characteristics such as occupation, gender, and level of education. Independent of these characteristics, though, people spend more time reading and using documents than any other type of printed material. People must therefore possess the skills needed to obtain information from documents.
Although people spend much of their reading time reading documents, little attention has been given to how they may be taught to systematically understand and use them. In elementary schools, students are taught to read using narratives. In secondary and postsecondary schools, they are taught to read using exposition. After school, however, people read documents to accomplish specific goals. To help people accomplish their goals and improve their Document Literacy Skills, they need to be taught how to understand the structures of the materials they read. They also need to be taught strategies for finding and dealing with the necessary information in those structures. The inventors believe that if people can learn to infer structures in documents, they can use what they have learned about those structures to find the information they need.
Prior art approaches to teaching typically have failed to consider the underlying structural organization of documents. They also have failed to consider how different purposes for using documents require people to process the information contained in them differently. One such prior art example is found in Singer and Donlan (1989), which focused on graphs, charts and scales such as those found in reading in the content areas.
Beginning in October 1989, two of the inventors of the present invention, Kirsch and Mosenthal, coauthored a series of articles in the Journal of Reading about understanding documents. The purpose of the articles was to explore the nature of documents, the different purposes for using them, and the various strategies used to process them. The articles analyzed various document types and considered how different purposes for using documents require readers to process these structures differently. The articles did not disclose a computerized multimedia document literacy system. See the Bibliographic References section attached hereto for a list of the articles.
According to Kirsch and Mosenthal, as set forth in the articles, substantially all documents can be classified into a reasonably limited number of types, and each document type has a substantially limited number of uses. The document types are: (a) the four kinds of matrix documents: simple lists, combined lists, intersecting lists, and nested lists; (b) the three kinds of graphic documents: pie charts, bar graphs, and line graphs; (c) entry documents or forms; (d) the two kinds of maps: general reference maps and thematic maps; and (e) the four kinds of mimetic documents: pictures, diagrams, process schematics, and procedural schematics. Each of these document types will be discussed briefly in turn.
a. Matrix Documents
In each of the four matrix document types, information is arranged in rows and columns. Simple lists, the most basic of the document types, consist of a single list of items in which each item shares a minimum of one feature with all other items in the list. An example of a simple list is a shopping list. Combined lists are a concatenation or combination of two or more simple lists in which the items in the lists are related as a predicate to a subject. An example of a combined list is a restaurant menu, in which the price list is the predicate to the list of food items. Intersecting lists consist of three simple lists, of which two contain information which is redundant with respect to the third. An example of an intersecting list is a television listing, in which the list of programs predicates both the list of times and the list of channels. Nested lists, the most complicated of the matrix document types, contain at least two pairs of lists of predicate information, with each pair sharing the same label or title. An example of a nested list is a table depicting imports and exports for the years 1987 and 1988. In this case, the pair of lists "1987" and "1988" are nested under the pair "imports" and "exports". The labels "1987" and "1988" are repeated.
All the other types of documents are built on the foundation principles of the matrix documents. Prior art approaches to teaching students how to understand and use matrix documents typically have failed to consider their structures, how the structures of the different kinds of matrix documents are related to one another, and how the strategies used for extracting information from matrix documents depends upon the particular document structure.
b. Graphic Documents
Graphic documents organize quantitative information by representing it visually, as pictures. One kind of graphic document, pie charts, represents a quantitative feature or characteristic of some object differentiated into two or more pieces. The structure of pie charts is generally similar to the structure of a single row of intersecting lists. The other kinds of graphic documents, bar and line graphs, generally have structures which are similar to combined, intersecting or nested lists, in which at least one predicate list contains quantitative information. Because, unlike matrix documents, graphic documents are designed to make a visual impression, they provide a quick general look at numbers in relation to each other. They do not, however, provide for the close examination of many numbers in detail, as matrix documents do.
Although graphic documents have been in use for over 200 years, few people have understood how their structure relates to that of the matrix documents. Therefore, prior art teaching methods typically have failed to take into account that graphic documents are actually special cases of the matrix document structures, and that people can therefore apply many of the strategies for accessing information in matrix documents to graphic documents.
c. Forms
Forms are entry documents that must be filled in by someone. They are one of the most common and important document types which people must know how to use because people are usually affected by information they enter into forms. In modern society, after a person fills out an incomplete entry form, the form, now a completed document, is usually entered into a database with hundreds of other similar documents. This database, which has the structure of a combined list, is then filed, used or sold. Through the use of these databases, individuals are drafted, called for jury duty, sent junk mail, given paychecks, and called by the IRS. Some of the difficulty people have in using forms comes from the fact that the designers of the forms often have the database-makers in mind rather than the form-filers. Prior art approaches to teaching students how to fill out and use forms typically have failed to take this into account, and have failed to show how forms are related to the matrix and graphic documents.
d. Maps
Maps pictorially represent geographical areas of varying sizes. Using a combination of lines, words, symbols, and colors, maps represent a selected set of features and their distribution within a geographical area. General reference maps show features of the earth's surface that are easily recognized by most people. These include buildings, parks, roads, rivers, oceans, mountains, and political boundaries. In contrast, thematic maps focus on a particular topic as it relates to a given geographical area, such as daily weather patterns, annual rainfall or population density.
To date, most discussions on how to teach maps have focused on concerns associated with representing some geographic area. For instance, most "content area" texts list the essential map skills as: determining directions, interpreting a map's legend, applying a map's scale, understanding latitude and longitude, understanding common map terms, and understanding projections. While these skills are certainly important, little attention has focused on how to teach concepts for understanding structures of map content. Prior art approaches have also failed to relate the structures of maps to the structures of the other document types.
e. Mimetic Documents
Mimetic documents are visual representations which depict a phenomenon as it is observed or believed to exist. These representations include photographs or drawings that are typically found in illustrated dictionaries, encyclopedias, content area texts, and "how to" manuals. Two kinds of mimetic documents, pictures and diagrams, provide visual instances of an object phenomenon, which is a person, place, or thing viewed from a single perspective at a single point in time. As such, pictures and diagrams serve to portray a particular state of an object viewed from a fixed perspective. The other two kinds, process and procedural schematics, provide a visual instance of an event phenomenon, which involves changing states associated with persons, places, or things over time. These changes may involve processes such as weather cycles, steps in manufacturing a product, and blood circulating through the body, as well as procedures such as carrying out a recipe, following a set of assembly or operating instructions, and following the directions on a medicine label.
Mimetic documents are similar to graphic documents and maps in that they portray information visually. Mimetic documents differ from graphic documents, however, in that they focus on portraying a phenomenon's critical and variable features whereas graphic documents deal only with the quantitative characteristics of many objects. Mimetic documents differ also from maps in that they deal with phenomena independent of geographical area whereas maps portray phenomena, or characteristics of phenomena, only in the context of a particular geographical area. Prior art approaches to teaching students how to use mimetic documents typically failed to take these differences into account, and failed to relate the structures of mimetic documents to those of the other document types.
Although much attention in prior art literacy instruction has focused on teaching information organized as prose, little attention has focused on teaching information organized in document format. This is problematic given the importance and pervasiveness of documents. Therefore, the focus of one embodiment of the present invention is on teaching people to improve their Document Literacy Skills.
In addition, although the importance of prose material has been widely recognized in the prior art, the increasing importance of documents has not been so recognized. Documents are important, in part, because they serve a variety of functions. They enable people to: perform important actions (e.g., apply for a loan, secure medical reimbursement, cast a vote, and repair a disposal); make informed decisions (e.g., how much medicine to dispense to a child, determine the fat content of a particular food, and identify which brand of food is the cheapest per unit price); record actions and thoughts (e.g., maintain a check balance, make a list of food to buy, indicate responses on a standardized test, and remember birthdays); and organize and extract large amounts of information in relatively small amounts of space (e.g., bus schedules and income tax tables).
Documents are important also because they are extremely pervasive in modern society. To illustrate, over a decade ago, it was estimated that the total number of different British government forms was well over 100,000. The Associated Press estimated that in the mid-1970's, the United States government issued some 98,000 different forms per year and received over 500 million responses. During this period, the Internal Revenue Service alone sent out over 3,500 different forms. The pervasiveness of documents in elementary and secondary reading materials and achievement tests has also been noted.
The importance and pervasiveness of documents is also evidenced by the fact that the average North American adult spends more time reading documents than any other type of material. This has been confirmed by a variety of studies. For instance, in one study of over 100 households within a community of 6,000 residents, it was found that individuals--independent of occupational group, gender, and level of education--reported they spent more time reading short documents than any other type of material (including the categories of news and business, society and science, recreation and sports, fiction and viewpoint, and reference).
This pervasiveness of documents has only recently been recognized such that, in addition to a prose scale, a document scale has been included on many of the major national assessments, including the NAEP young adult literacy survey, mentioned above, the DOL workplace literacy assessment, the National Adult Literacy Survey, the NAEP reading assessment, and the International Education Assessment. In addition, many standardized tests (such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) now include documents as part of their measures of reading and math abilities.
However, despite this recent recognition of the importance and pervasiveness of documents, few instructional methods have been developed which teach documents using a systematic framework. Most instructional recommendations for teaching documents to date have been comprised of little more than providing practice in answering one or more tasks created for understanding a single aspect of a single document (e.g., signing one's name on a job application or ordering merchandise from a specific catalogue). Under this approach, each task and its concomitant document is treated as a unique activity, and no attempt is made to teach the underlying structure, content, and strategies of documents in such a way to facilitate the transfer of skills across the universe of Document Literacy Skills.
This instructional limitation is further compounded by the lack of consistency, in current document pedagogy, for labeling and classifying different document structures, contents, and strategies. In many cases, the nomenclature of documents in various instructional practices varies from one approach to another. For instance, in some instructional approaches, a "chart" is defined as a "map" and a "graph" is defined as a "diagram." In turn, a "diagram" is defined as a "schematic" and a "schematic" is defined as a "picture." As instructional designers have demonstrated, without a consistent framework by which teachers, as well as students, can consciously understand and discuss the dimensions of a problem, students have no basis for solving document-related problems effectively. In terms of completing document tasks, this means that, without a common rhetoric for identifying and describing the underlying structures, contents, and strategies of documents, teachers have few universal tools for equipping themselves and their students to understand and master Document Literacy Skills.
3. Quantitative Material
Quantitative material can be presented in varying degrees in several possible formats, including prose, document, or a combination of prose and document. This material requires a reader to perform mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, either singly or in combination. The level of proficiency at reading, understanding and using quantitative material is a function of several factors, including the level of proficiency at understanding and using the underlying prose or document, the particular operation required, the number of operations needed to get a result, and the extent to which the numerical task is embedded in the printed material. Therefore, there is some overlap in the skills and strategies required to use quantitative material with those needed to use prose and documents. One embodiment of the present invention uses this correlation between the teaching of Quantitative Literacy Skills and the teaching of Prose and Document Literacy Skills to teach students in a more efficient and effective manner.